The e-Reader Battle Reaches India

The rise and rise of e-books and electronic publishing has prompted the development of e-readers: handy, portable devices that try to mimic the reading experience of paper books while offering the storage and navigation capability of computers.

A good example is the very popular e-reader from Amazon, the Kindle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle). The latest version boasts the ability to store up to 3,500 books.

The utility of these e-readers for people in the global South is clear: they can enable people to bypass the lack of local library facilities to store vast, personal archives of books. This is a powerful educational tool: imagine a village doctor with easy access to thousands of medical texts and papers, or a child preparing for university exams no longer having to worry they can find study texts. It also is a cost-effective way to publish in many local languages and break the stranglehold English-language publishing has had on delivering e-books.

Over the past decade, India has developed a reputation for its fast-growing information technology industries, making software and providing IT-related services.

Now India has produced a rival to the Kindle. The Wink (https://www.thewinkstore.com/ereader/index) is designed to accommodate 15 common Indian languages. (The 2001 census in India found 29 languages with at least a million native speakers). It comes in an eye-catching design and is complemented by a sleek website stuffed with e-books ready for download. The entire package is very well-thought-out and marketed.

The Wink was developed and built by EC Media International and retails, according to its website, for Rs 8,999 (US $200). It looks similar to the Kindle, but where the Kindle is grey the Wink is white. This Indian rival has some impressive capabilities: it can not only support 15 Indian languages, it can also access an online library of more than 200,000 book titles. They range from arts and entertainment to biography, newspapers and science topics. There is also a large archive of free books for download.

But it has come in for criticism for its price, which some say is far too high for the Indian market.

The Tech 2 website also criticized the Wink for its “frustrating performance, which actually detracts from the pleasure of reading.” Overall it found the reader “a decent first attempt, but there are many issues that need to be ironed out.”

It can be a rocky road to information technology hardware innovation. And maybe this first attempt at a made-in-India e-reader still has a way to go to get it right. There have been a number of high-profile, over-hyped disappointments in the last few years. One was the pledge to make a US $35 tablet computer. The project was launched in 2010 with much fanfare, but by January 2011 the Indian government had dropped manufacturers HCL Technologies for failing to honour its 600 million rupee (US $13 million) contract.

It joins the disappointing attempt at rivalling the One Laptop Per Child (www.onelaptop.org) computer from MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology) with an Indian version for US $10. What was offered instead in 2009 was a device with no screen or keyboard, requiring an additional laptop and paper to access its stored files. It was also made in Taiwan, rather than India.

What these first steps show is the complexity of hardware development and how challenging it is to get the user experience right for customers while keeping the price affordable.

But from these tries comes experience, and in time better products will be developed as lessons are learned.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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African Botanicals to be used to Boost Fight against Parasites

More than 1 billion people in the developing world currently suffer from tropical diseases, which leave a trail of disfigurement, disability and even death. Yet only 16 out of 1,393 – 0.01 percent – of new medicines marketed between 1975 and 1999 targeted tropical diseases (International Journal of Public Health).

A combination of poverty and lack of political will means disease-ridden countries do not invest enough in research and development to find new medical remedies to save lives.

A pioneering project hopes to turn to the continent’s plants to dig up new remedies to tackle the many diseases borne by parasites.

It seeks to boost prosperity in Africa while taking on the many diseases that harm and kill people and hold back economic progress on the continent. If successful, it will make disease-fighting part of the future prosperity of African science – and boost the woefully neglected field of tropical medicine.

What is at stake is the future of Africa, as the continent has the lowest life expectancies in the world. With just 15 percent of the world’s population, Africa carries a high disease burden, for example it has 60 percent of the global HIV/AIDS-infected population. Access to clean water is poor, with only 58 percent of people living in sub-Saharan Africa having access to safe water supplies (WHO). This leaves people exposed to water-borne parasites like Schistosoma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schistosoma), which infects hundreds of millions and is the most crucial parasitic disease to tackle after malaria.

Africa’s biggest killers in order of severity are HIV/AIDS, diarrhoeal diseases, tuberculosis, malaria, childhood diseases, sexually transmitted diseases, meningitis, tropical diseases, Hepatitis B and C, Japanese encephalitis, intestinal nematode and leprosy.

Health resources are not being proportionately allocated: only 10 percent of financing for global health research is allocated to problems that affect 90 percent of the world’s population. This has been called the 10/90 gap (http://www.globalforumhealth.org/About/10-90-gap).

“The untapped potential of African innovation capacity is enormous,” explains Dr. Éliane Ubalijoro, an adjunct professor of practice for public and private sector partnerships at Canada’s McGill University Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID) (http://www.mcgill.ca/isid). Her research interests focus on innovation in global health and sustainable development.

“Using African biodiversity to produce solutions to local (and global) problems will provide a generous return on investment in an area of the world that is destined for growth.”

Ubalijoro was recently awarded, along with Professor Timothy Geary, director of McGill’s Institute of Parasitology, a Grand Challenges Canada (http://www.grandchallenges.ca) grant of CAD $1 million (US $1.04 million) to address parasitic disease through African biodiversity.

The Grand Challenges Canada grants are “dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people in developing countries by integrating scientific, technological, business and social innovation.”

It’s predicted Africa’s growing population will reach between 1.5 and 2 billion inhabitants before 2050: a lot of people needing affordable remedies and treatments.

Innovators have spotted an opportunity to simultaneously improve public health while also boosting Africa’s income from discovering new drugs. Traditional knowledge can play a critical part in the evolving innovation and commercialisation of Africa’s medicines and treatments.

Turning to these remedies and botanicals needs careful stewardship: Africa has a terrible reputation for counterfeit medicines, which kill and harm many people every year. The medicines also need to be affordable and accessible.

In some Asian and African countries, 80 percent of people use traditional medicines for primary care at some point (WHO). There may be sceptics amongst those used to name-brand medicines but traditional African medicines have a rich cultural heritage and have sustained Africans over the centuries. It is estimated the continent has over 50,000 plants to draw from, with fewer than 10 percent so far investigated to tap their potential medical utility.

From the start, most of the new funding for the McGill project will be spent in Africa. Out of the CAD $1 million dollar grant, more than half the funds will go directly to partners at the University of Cape Town and the University of Botswana. At first, the funds will be used to screen local biodiversity for promising leads. These will then be subjected to chemical testing in the lab to extract their potential utility for treatments.

“This system allows selection of natural product compounds that act on multiple target sites in the parasite,” according to Ubalijoro, “thus reducing the chances of developing resistance to the kinds of novel drugs that we hope to develop based on promising leads derived from this effort.”

The approach being taken by the project hopes to reduce the time it takes to get drugs to market and to shift the power and initiative to local solutions and scientists, rather than waiting for outsiders to come to the rescue.

The project hopes to contribute to not only improving people’s health but to stimulating local economies. This will be done by growing local pharmaceutical industries, retaining local talent which often now leaves the continent and doing rewarding and dynamic science within Africa. In short: making being in Africa attractive.

It is hoped the success of the project will breed more success, as has happened in other places – think Silicon Valley in California, or Bangalore in India.

“Success in this project will diminish the risk for technology-based investments related to health innovation,” said Ubalijoro, “helping to encourage local venture capital to help grow African science entrepreneurs. The overall benefit is improved livelihoods and prosperity locally as well as reduced spread of disease threats locally and internationally as we travel globally. ”

By bringing the science closer to those who need the help, it is hoped the painfully slow process of new drug development will take on a greater urgency.

“Discovery to production of a marketable drug can be a lengthy process,” said Ubalijoro. “But as novel methodologies are used to decrease candidate drug failure through the development and clinical processes, we can decrease the time it takes to bring drugs to market while empowering local innovation systems to lead the process instead of waiting for others to do so.

“The sense of urgency felt by local scientists to solve local problems can stimulate innovation and safe delivery of new medicines for African populations.”

Ubalijoro wants to see greater cooperation across disciplines and for people to come together in “innovation clusters,” that bring together policy, business and technical capability.

“I would like to see local investment in innovation coming from the public, private and NGO sectors,” explained Ubalijoro. “I would also like to see women scientists taking an active role in leadership and in becoming the next generation of innovating African scientists.”

Ubalijoro says that for those with money to invest, this is a vast opportunity waiting to be tapped. And she would like to see a dedicated African Innovation Fund set up for this purpose

“The message for venture capitalists and investors is simple: by cultivating local talent, we can help African scientists and entrepreneurs explore indigenous-based solutions to local health problems while taking advantage of the most advanced technologies available globally to ensure that quality, risk mitigation and profits can grow hand in hand with healing the ailments of African populations.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Floating Bank Floats New Dreams for Brazilian Middle Class

Brazil’s booming economy has seen a dramatic increase in the size of its middle class. More and more people have been lifted out of poverty as a growing, stable economy overcomes years of political and economic instability. In 2010, Brazil’s economy grew by a record 7.5 percent, surpassing a previous peak in 1986 (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) (IBGE) (www.ibge.gov.br/english). The country’s gross domestic product (GDP) reached 3.67 trillion reais (US $2.21 trillion) in 2010, making it Latin America’s largest economy.

This strong growth is being fuelled by growing domestic demand in Brazil.

One key component in building personal wealth is the ability to save and bank. It is common across the global South for the poor and lower middle classes to be ignored by traditional banking services.

Freezing large numbers of people out of banking services is a double problem. Individuals are being denied a safe way to store and grow wealth and borrow to improve their economic situation, and the wider economy suffers because many millions are left out of the mainstream economy and can neither consume high-value products nor use services beyond those that meet the basic needs of daily survival.

This leaves many economies experiencing what can be described as a whirlpool effect: wealth spiralling around small clusters of people – for example those with privileged access to natural resources – but failing to spread across the whole of society. This has the effect of discounting the contribution made by the majority of a nation’s people. That majority is a market that needs tending to, not ignoring, as pioneers like the late C.K. Prahalad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._K._Prahalad) have shown.

In Brazil, one major bank has woken up to this fact and is pioneering services for millions of the nation’s “unbanked” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbanked). Even wealthy countries like the United States have large numbers of unbanked people, often those living paycheck to paycheck and with little or no savings. In the US in 2009, 7.7 percent of the population fell into this category (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) (FDIC).

Banco Bradesco SA (www.bradesco.com.br) has pioneered reaching the poor and marginalised by opening branches in long-neglected places like the impoverished and crime-ridden shanty town favelas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favela) that surround major cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. It is creating a path other businesses can follow.

“Every bank will care about these people eventually,” Odair Rebelato, the executive heading Bradesco’s retail banking outreach programme, told The Wall Street Journal.

According to FEBRABAN (http://www.febraban.org.br), the Brazilian Banking Federation, the number of bank accounts in the country has tripled in the past decade. It has surged from 42 million in 1997, to 126 million by the end of 2008. That still leaves around 50 million Brazilians who do not have bank accounts.

It’s not just poverty that cuts many Brazilians off from banking services – there is also the problem of isolation.

Brazil is home to the largest portion of the vast Amazon rainforest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Rainforest), whose population is spread out in isolated villages reachable only by boat. The capital of Amazonas state, Manaus, is the economic hub of the region but transport links only connect it to major cities and not the region’s many isolated villages.

A solution to both problems comes in the form of Bradesco bank’s Voyager III, a three-deck riverboat converted into a floating bank. Launched in November 2010, the white-and-blue 38 metre riverboat ventures up the Solimões River on a journey to 50 isolated communities in 11 municipalities.

“It was something never seen before in the world – a floating branch,” Nézio Vieira, a Bradesco bank manager in São Paulo, told Monocle magazine. “We are now present in 100 per cent of Brazil’s municipalities.”

Luzia Moraes is a former housewife and now the manager of the Voyager III’s floating bank. The bank offers savings and checking accounts, personal loans and direct deposits. Most of the customers are public servants, pensioners and the poor.

It is a simple operation: a red banner is hung in a cramped former storeroom on the boat. Sitting behind a desk, Moraes has just three tools to offer the full banking services: a laptop computer, a printer and an automated teller machine.

Enterprising and adventures, Moraes even uses canoes and rafts to reach out from the riverboat to even remoter villages.

“Before, there were cases where people would take 10 to 12 hours by boat to get to a bank. It wasn’t worth it,” Vieira said. “To be able to serve these river-dwellers you need to go to them. Today the Voyager goes there.”

The Voyager III has signed up more than 1,000 new account holders by touring the river. It heads off every two weeks from Manaus, reaching as far as a remote town on the border with Colombia and Peru, Tabatinga.

The boat’s computers communicate with a satellite, allowing 24-hour access to the bank’s servers so people can access accounts and apply for loans.

A regional lifeblood, the Voyager III also carries 500 tons of beans, chicken, bleach and other goods to sell on the 1,609 kilometre river journey. The boat can carry around 200 passengers for the trip.

“People don’t know what to think,” Moraes told The Wall Street Journal, “but it’s not hard to explain that a bank can make things easier.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Indonesian Food Company Helps Itself by Making Farmers More Efficient

The current global economic crisis is taking place at the same time as a global food crisis. Food inflation took off at the beginning of 2011. This is having a devastating affect on countries dependent on food imports and experiencing decreasing domestic production capabilities. The least developed countries (LDCs) saw food imports rise from US $9 billion in 2002, to US $23 billion by 2008 (UNCTAD), prompting Supachai Panitchpakdi, secretary general of UNCTAD, to say “the import dependence has become quite devastating.”

Garuda Food (www.garudafood.com), one of Indonesia’s leading snack food and drink manufacturers, has been boosting its own productivity by investing in improving the productivity of domestic small-scale farmers. This led to a doubling of crop purchases from peanut farmers between 2007 and 2009. By stabilising the market for peanuts and better guaranteeing income, it has attracted more people into becoming peanut farmers in the region.

This is crucial for the future of feeding the planet: we need more farmers.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, with a population of over 238 million, spread out over a network of islands. Peanut farmers in West Nusa Tenggara (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Nusa_Tenggara) (one of Indonesia’s poorest places) are a key part of the region’s wealth. Peanuts are the area’s third largest crop after rice, maize and soybeans, and the region supplies six percent of the country’s peanut production and 10 percent of Garuda Food’s needs.

Garuda Food says investing in farmers has raised its own productivity by a third. Turning past practices on its head, this large agri-food company is supporting small-scale farmers and helping them to boost their productivity and incomes. Conventional wisdom had been to view small-scale farmers as an inefficient hold-over from the past – the quicker they were driven out of business, the better.

The Indonesian peanut farmers were using traditional farming methods and local seeds. Knowledge of more sustainable farming methods and land management techniques was poor. The farmers were also beholden to the whims of local buyers and fluctuating market prices.

Then Garuda Food stepped in. The company’s field staff offer the farmers training, and through its subsidiary PT Bumi Mekar Tani, it spreads knowledge about new agricultural practices and provides the farmers with quality seeds and farming equipment.

The company buys crops directly from the farmers, rather than from middlemen, increasing the amount the farmer makes. A premium is also paid if the farmer achieves better quality for their crop.

“We receive substantial supply from peanut farmers in NTB (West Nusa Tenggara) and we hope the arrangement will continue,” Garuda Food’s managing director Hartono Atmadja told the Enchanting Lombok website.

Garuda Food’s initiative, with support from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and AusAID, through the Australia Indonesia Partnership, has raised the productivity for 8,000 small-scale farmers by 30 percent: an income boost for the farmers of 3.9 million Indonesian rupiah (US $456) per hectare annually.

Peanut farmer H. Sajidin told the IFC (International Finance Corporation): “My farm’s productivity doubled, my income improved significantly, and I can sleep peacefully at night knowing that Garuda Food will buy my crops at agreed prices.”

Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World Food System (http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/frontpage), has grappled with the conundrum of how to feed a rapidly growing planet. He finds the world is not lacking in food, but distributes its bounty very poorly and wastefully, leaving a planet where some people are literally ‘stuffed’ with too much food (the well-documented global obesity crisis) and others left to starve.

He finds the solution is often local.

“It turns out that if you’re keen to make the world’s poorest people better off, it’s smarter to invest in their farms and workplaces than to send them packing to the cities,” Patel wrote recently in Foreign Policy. “In its 2008 World Development Report, the World Bank found that, indeed, investment in peasants was among the most efficient and effective ways of raising people out of poverty and hunger.”

Patel uses the example of the southern African nation of Malawi, where “according to one estimate, the marginal cost of importing a ton of food-aid maize is $400, versus $200 a ton to import it commercially, and only $50 to source it domestically using fertilizers.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: May 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=joCYBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+may+2011&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsmay2011issue

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Solar Sisters Doing it for Themselves: Tackling African Light Famine

A social enterprise is seeking to capture the power of the sun to bring light and economic opportunity to women in Africa. Using a direct-marketing distribution system, it sells solar lamps and lanterns to some of Africa’s remotest communities. Solar Sister (www.solarsister.org), launched in Uganda in 2010, is hoping to do for power generation what mobile phones have done for communication in Africa: make a technological leap to a model of grassroots power generation, rather than waiting for large-scale power schemes to eventually reach the poor and rural.

More than 1.7 billion people around the world have no domestic electricity supply, of which more than 500 million live in sub-Saharan Africa (World Bank).

Solar power is being creatively used in many countries to tackle energy poverty and give women, in particular, viable sources of income. In India, whole villages are already using solar energy and improving their standard of living. Various companies and projects are selling inexpensive solar appliances – from cooking stoves to lanterns and power generators – across the country.

A billion Africans use just four percent of the world’s electricity (The Economist). Energy poverty is already harming further economic growth and development gains. With Africa’s population expected to double to 2 billion by 2050, the gap between people’s needs and the power available is stark: in Nigeria, out of 79 power stations, only 17 are working (The Economist).

A report by the International Finance Corporation called the sub-Saharan solar market the largest in the world – a market of 65 million would-be customers, who could access off-grid lighting over the next five years (IFC). The report anticipated high growth rates of 40 to 50 percent for anyone entering the market, with less than one percent of the market currently being served.

Being able to see at night unleashes a vast range of possibilities, such as being able to work or study later. But for the very poor, lighting is often the most expensive household expense.

As Solar Sister founder Katherine Lucey points out, households “rely on kerosene lanterns and candles for light. They spend up to 40 percent of their family income on energy that is inefficient, insufficient and hazardous. Widespread use of kerosene has an adverse impact on local air quality as well as on global climate change.

“Poor lighting, smoke and rudimentary lanterns are responsible for a large number of infections and burn injuries. Within the household, women are responsible for kerosene purchases and use – in order for new clean energy technology to be adopted at the household level, women have to ‘buy in’ to the technology.”

And this is the challenge: to find an affordable – and sustainable – way to bring electricity and energy to people living in remote and rural areas. These are places that face stark options: to remain off-grid and energy poor, or to abandon their communities and join the many millions across the global South on the march to urban and semi-urban areas in search of income and opportunity.

Lucey says that could be “a recipe for disaster”.

“In a country like Uganda, with a population of 32 million people, it is not possible to have them all move to Kampala to access electricity,” she said. “It would overburden already stretched infrastructure and services and disrupt the social and economic structures of an entire population. In the end, it can challenge the stability of entire nations.”

The Solar Sister direct-marketing model works like this: micro-investment capital of US $500 is invested in one Solar Sister Entrepreneur and she receives a ‘business in a bag': a start-up kit of inventory, training and marketing resources. As her own boss, she has a strong incentive to succeed. She uses the money to purchase a consignment of lamps or lanterns, which she then sells, encouraging people to replace kerosene lamps with solar lamps: healthier, safer and better for the environment. She is encouraged to use her existing networks of family, friends and neighbours to reach rural and hard-to-reach customers.

The Solar Sister, after succeeding in selling the first consignment of lamps, then receives training in marketing and inventory and business skills. She can then move on to be a team leader and recruit other Solar Sisters. She earns a commission from the lamp sales, which help to improve her ability to pay for healthcare, education and food for her family. She then repays the cash for the lamps and the cycle starts all over again with a new consignment.

The model will sound familiar to many: it is what has built successful marketing machines like the famous all-women’s make-up and beauty products seller Avon (www.avon.com). Or the other famous direct marketing behemoth, Amway (www.amway.co.uk).

The Solar Sister model is heavily dependent on the success of word-of-mouth to grow:

“What we have found is that the women are the best distribution system for bringing new technology to rural households since they sell through their trusted networks of family, friends and neighbours,” Lucey said. “They use the lamps themselves, and then talk passionately about the benefits: the better light, the money they save by not having to buy kerosene, the amount of time their children are able to study, the cleaner air and safer environment for their kids.”

According to Lucey, the business model “brings solar technology right to the women’s doorstep. The Solar Sister business model developed as a grass-roots solution to the gender-based technology gap. Women make up 70 percent of the rural poor, but are often left out ‘in the dark’ when it comes to technology solutions.”

It is still early days for Solar Sister, which has been in operation for just over a year and now has 107 Solar Sister Entrepreneurs working in 10 teams reaching 34 communities in three countries – Uganda, Rwanda and Sudan. Lucey says the goal is to build a network of 1,500 female entrepreneurs in Africa over the next two years, benefiting over 1 million people.

Apart from the business model and the new technology, there is a radical concept at the heart of Solar Sister: to replicate for electricity generation the distributed and rapid growth that has been seen with mobile phones. In just five years, the availability of mobile phones in Africa increased by 550 percent.

“Distributed energy, such as solar, puts the investment in energy generation rather than transmission, and breaks the problem into smaller, achievable, components that do not have to wait for political processes for implementation,” explains Lucey. “It allows for the possibility that people can solve their own problems rather than wait for government or NGOs to come solve their energy problems for them. Distributed solar has the potential to leap-frog the 20th century grid-based solution, much like mobile phones have done in the telecom industry.”

One of the solar lanterns for sale is manufactured by D.Light Design. Their newest lantern model is called Kiran (http://www.dlightdesign.com/products_kiran_global.php). It sells for US $10 and provides up to eight hours of light on a full battery, its manufacturers say. D.Light Design calls it the “$10 Kerosene Killer” because it believes it has the right mix of price and technology to trump the need to use kerosene lanterns. The lantern gives off a white light powerful enough so people can read, study or do domestic tasks. A solar panel sits on top of the lantern, which is shaped like a drinking thermos with a large carry handle on top.

Other solar lamps/lanterns have been burdened by cost, ranging in price from US $15 to US $30: a prohibitive price for many poor people.

The ubiquity of mobile phone payments in Africa has made it much easier to transfer funds back and forth between the entrepreneurs and Solar Sister. And since its launch, Solar Sister has learned how to change and adapt to local conditions.

“These women are the experts in their local communities of what works and what doesn’t,” Lucey said. “Solar Sister Voila (http://www.solarsister.org/voila-uganda) decided to visit the roadside market stalls at night when shopkeepers were burning kerosene lamps for light. She got their instant attention with the high brightness of her solar powered lamps.

“Solar Sister’s mission is to bring more and more women from the veils of smoke, darkness and anonymity to the forefront of a clean energy revolution.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: April 2011

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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